by MATTHEW HAYS

It surely must be some kind of bizarre record. For two years running the biggest buzz at Cannes has been two films about and/or inspired by an American event, namely the school shootings at Columbine High. Last year’s, of course, was Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, a film that won a special award there and would go on to win the Best-doc Oscar amid a flurry of controversy.

This year, openly-gay filmmaker Gus Van Sant would enter the fold with Elephant, an eerily realistic portrait of a group of high school teens. Set in Van Sant’s home town of Portland, Oregon, the director chose to cast a group of teens, none of whom had ever acted before. There was no script, and thus the Columbine-inspired movie, which culminates with a mass school shooting, takes on a documentary-like sense similar to that of a Frederick Wiseman film. One scene in particular has a teen pausing after taking a few shots at his fellow students, sipping on a drink left in a glass on a cafeteria table, and then resume shooting. The scene is based on actual security-camera footage that captured the very same bit of behaviour by one of the Columbine murderers. Elephant captivated critics and audiences alike at Cannes, though it also prompted Variety critic Todd McCarthy to call it anti-American.

Van Sant spoke to the Mirror about the film and various controversies surrounding it from his Portland, Oregon home.

Mirror: This film is so different from Bowling for Columbine, last year’s hit about the shootings. You don’t take such a prescriptive stance as Moore does. Elephant is remarkably open-ended. If you don’t float an idea in the film, what do you think the cause of Columbine and the other school shootings was?

Gus Van Sant: There have been a lot of anti-gun activists who’ve written to me since seeing Elephant. And they’ve been asking me to join the cry. Guns are their own issue, outside of school shootings. School shootings are some of the most dramatic examples of having so many guns around. A stronger issue, to me, is that of conformity. By conforming, I think kids get rewards. The ones who aren’t turning out as homogenous as everyone else tend to get the feeling that they won’t fit in anywhere. Those kids may think of striking out, either by ending their lives, running away, or ending others’ lives. I think it stems from this need to have everything alike. The guns are a resort. It’s not just their proximity that brought this about.

Canadian content

M: Your cast is phenomenal. I’m struck by that scene where the three girls go into the washroom after eating and purge. I know a great deal of the film was improvised. How much of what went on in scenes was the cast’s ideas and how much of it were things that you told them to do?

GVS: The whole idea of them bulimically throwing up, came not from them, but from a story someone told me. Other than that, however, they were pretty much on their own. The things that they were talking about were things that they had talked about during the casting session.

M: You’ve praised Canada in interviews. We seem to be getting a real reputation as a Utopia. It’s something Michael Moore points to as well.

GVS: (laughs) Michael Moore was talking about how people aren’t locking their doors or stashing guns away in their houses. He also asks Charlton Heston why there’s so much more gun violence here than in Canada. It’s easy for people to say that in North America we’re a pioneer country and that’s why we have more gun violence. That doesn’t really allow for the fact that Canada was a pioneer state as well.

I think some of the things that I think about is that there seems to be less need for conformity and more openness for diversity, which I think is encouraged by the mindset of Canadians and also the government.

M: Did the charges of being anti-American at Cannes, did that upset you?

GVS: Do you mean the Todd McCarthy review of the film that ran in Variety?

M: Yeah.

GVS: (laughs) He charged a lot of people with being anti-American. Including the French journalists. I think he thought they had too much sway in how films were chosen. He was accusing everyone! I don’t travel outside of America that much. I suppose you could be exclusively American and still be anti-American. I’m not sure if you can wage an anti-American campaign from your own being.

Homosexual fascist killers?

M: He also says that the reason for the shooting is that they were gay Nazis.

GVS: I didn’t know this, but when we were making the film, apparently some of the rally cries around Columbine were that "Fags did this." The Nazi film that screens on TV at one point, they’re not really watching that because they’re Nazis, they don’t really know what they’re watching. They’re just waiting for the guns at that point. If you watch the History Channel, much of the time they’re showing films about Nazis or WWII, because people will tune in for that easier. Unless you want to say that anyone who watches a film about Hitler on the History Channel is a Nazi. I wouldn’t.

And the gay part is clearly referring to the kiss in the shower. And the kiss in the shower is, I don’t know, I just thought that the film was about boys who were like that, boys who spent a year in the basement alone, and if they were on their way to commit suicide, something like that might happen. I didn’t want to ignore that part of their person that relates to each other in a sensual way. I didn’t think of it as gay particularly, but I guess it is in that moment.

M: Have any gay groups like GLAAD responded to the film?

GVS: I don’t really think of labelling these two kids gay. In some ways it’s that they just haven’t ever kissed anyone. It’s that they are inexperienced, innocent kids. They don’t know what they’re doing in the shower, and they don’t know what they’re doing on the way to the school with the guns. We’ll see how people respond to them. Generally, I don’t hear from groups, unless I read about it occasionally or through the grapevine. I’ve never read a GLAAD review, but I don’t get their newsletter.

M: I guess you don’t have a lot of time for the old Vito Russo [author of The Celluloid Closet] positive image arguments…

GVS: I think Vito was right about a lot of things. I don’t think that if he saw this he would say it falls into that though. I don’t think he was a reactionary, if that’s the right term. He tried to understand images rather than knee-jerk reactions. The killers are gay but so are the kids in the gay-straight alliance in the film. That’s the thing about high school, the gay kids aren’t sure if they’re gay and the straight kids aren’t sure if they’re straight. The film’s not really coming out and saying that anyone’s gay or straight. Because one kid gets into the shower and kisses another kid, I’m not sure that makes him gay. I think that makes it a kiss. Rather than a sexual orientation.

Elephant has its Canadian premiere at the World Film Festival, which screens from today, Aug. 28 until Sunday, Sept. 7

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